


Circuses

by infiniteviking



Category: Tron (Movies), Tron: Legacy (2010)
Genre: Action, Angst, Gen, Original Character(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-08
Updated: 2011-12-08
Packaged: 2017-11-15 19:59:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 310
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/531138
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/infiniteviking/pseuds/infiniteviking
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One of the surviving Disc Wars conscripts watches the Final Round.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Circuses

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a song-drabble meme; the soundtrack for this drabble is [Blue Stahli -- 88 Rounds Per Minute](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-vbt7LYZAg). Wulf's name was on the Disc Wars scoreboard in the movie, but his characterization here is mine.

It wasn't as though Wulf didn't have every idea what Rinzler was capable of. True, he'd scarcely had occasion to treat programs who'd suffered the Champion's attentions, but the fact that so few returned to the holding cells after the Final Round spoke for itself, as did the inevitable, unstoppable demise of those whom Rinzler didn't bother to finish off completely.

Knowing, though -- it was so much different from seeing.

_Side. Ribs. Throat. Feint. Shoulder._

He couldn't figure out how the other program had even gotten in there, much less how he'd lived long enough to do so. Poor bsod was trying, yes, but -- there, the shoulder: torque impaired, for all the program's redundancies were straining past the gash. And yet he wasn't dead.

Rinzler was playing.

_Down. Clash. Shunt. Rake. Twist. Block, so fierce it might itself have been a blow._

He understood, now, the whispers that it was better to die early than land in the final ring. Understood just _how_ the Champion could be what he was, could be all he was rumored to and yet still more. Understood as his eyes and instinct raced each blow along the vector of its maximum potential, followed each movement in its terrible precision and efficiency, contrasted the fluid beauty with the harsh broken growl that rumbled ceaselessly from some hidden fault that should have been acute enough to cripple but was somehow ignored.

_Convergence. Contact. Checkmate._

_Game over._

Wulf hadn't felt dread in a long time, or hadn't differentiated it from just another day at the Arena, so it took him a moment to figure out why he felt constricted, why his hands were shaking.

 

Nanocycles later, when for the first time in uncounted cycles the frenzied voices chanting _Derezz!_ went silent without receiving their due, he no longer knew what it was that he felt at all.  
___


End file.
